How To Build Wealth In 2025 | Codie Sanchez | Align Podcast #524
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Welcome back to the Line Podcast. My name is Aaron Alexander and this conversation is all about communication. How to communicate more effectively to get the things that we want out of our life, in business, in family, in relationship, within ourselves.

communication, rapport building, developing relationships. It is one of the most important things we could possibly have for anything that matters in our lives. And the conversation is also all about money, how to make more of it, how to invest it correctly, how to feel safe and confident with our relationship with money. It's a lot around the psychology of money. It is with the beautiful Cody Sanchez. She is the CEO of Contrarian Thinking, a financial advice enterprise.

boasting over 2.5 million subscribers. She's also the co-founder of Unconventional Acquisitions, focused on small business acquisitions for regular folks like you and I. I presume you're regular. I'm regular. So really great conversation. Cody's amazing. She is just a wealth...

it's a pun of knowledge and she is just very kind she's very supportive she is someone that i consider a friend and someone that i am very grateful to get to share her wealth of knowledge here today on the podcast she recently authored a book called main street millionaire we get into that how y'all can make some more skrilla this year going into 2025 the world's

in an interesting place economically and i think that it's a wise thing if you care about your health to get your finances sorted out as well so that's what this conversation is about i appreciate you subscribing uh jump over check out the alive podcast youtube channel if you want to see the video version of this and thank you for reviews thank you for sharing this with a friend that you care about if you care about them feeling financially safe and developing their capacity for better relationships and communication

I appreciate you sharing. That's it, that's all. Let's get to it with the beautiful Cody Sanchez. Cody Sanchez, thanks for making time to do this. - Are you kidding me? I'm so excited to be here. - I have a bunch of questions. I wanna start off with something engaging. That's what I'm saying I'm supposed to do.

And then we'll get into other things. What is it like losing $12 million? It doesn't feel great. It's not at the top of my to-do list, I hope, for you. Do you like that? How I'm going... Yeah. This is what you got to do. This is the internet. You got to hook it. Yeah, that's right. People want to know what it feels like to lose miserably. Yeah, I mean, I remember the moment we got the phone call.

Where they were like the thing is we're about two weeks out of cash and that was after we'd given them tens of millions of dollars and Was them that mention or not? Okay, not to say the name probably the right thing to do Even though I deserves it to be honest, but you know Just fraud massive fraud in a company. I'm stealing a bunch of cash Armenian

Asian. Nice. But he, uh, Your assistant's Armenian. Yeah, she is. We don't, we don't use, I don't know, how's the system? Is that good? It sounds like, what do you say? She's a production manager. Like support. Yeah. She's my right hand. Life concierge. She's my ride or die. Life concierge. Yeah, exactly. Um, but yeah, so I mean, we, we lost, uh,

$12 million, theoretically, they had taken all that money and just lit it on fire. Like multiple apartments for multiple mistresses, not just one. That wouldn't be sufficient. Parties, you know, and this was in a period in time where we were investing in some slightly larger businesses.

But the worst part about it, losing the money is scary. But the worst part is we had this asset that was worth way more than that. So it was like we could lose 12 or we could lose 50. And so then you got to go in and you got to try to turn around this company and you got to try to take it over. And that was pretty miserable work for a while there. But we ended up being able to turn around the company and make money on it. But that was not the feeling the first day. What do you do?

What is that feeling like in your body? And what do you do with yourself when you feel overwhelmed? Tightness of chest, you know real panic in the stomach sort of that feeling when you're at the top of the roller coaster and you're about to fall down You know imagine that it's kind of this like oh my fuck and you know every sentence just compounds it That's like the little ticks in the in the rail car on the way down and

In that moment, my dad has an incredible line that he taught me. I remember I called him on a different night when another company almost ran out of money. And he said, listen, when you're on a construction site and you're walking along and you get a nail through the boot, you don't

look at the nail, ask why, what happened, who could have done this to me, why am I the victim? You just pull out the fucking nail. You pour a little alcohol on it and you stitch that bad boy up. And then you can figure out why it happened and how to not have it happen to you again. But he's like, you're just in the game. This is the game. And the game of business and ownership is getting kicked in the dick every once in a while. And then you write down a list. I remember that moment. I was like, all right.

How bad is it? First, it's like assess the wound, right? I imagine this is like what a doctor would do, like a field medic or something. They'd be like, okay, we got a bullet wound. What's happening? Are we sure that's what it is? Did it go out? Did it go in? What's the deal? Can I see the landscape? All right. I feel like I kind of understand the landscape. Now, what are my options? What kind of tools I got? Write all those down. I don't like to choose up front. I think that's a rookie mistake. A lot of people go, okay, well, here's what we're going to do. It's like, no, no, no. Take a deep breath to your point.

What are all my options? I'm going to write them down. Emphasize the exhale. Yeah. Yeah. Do a breath hold. That's true. Maybe recirculate carbon dioxide. Get a bag. Yeah, that's probably true. Like have a hug. Long hug. Yeah. I don't do the hugs. 15 second. I think if you tried to hug me right after I lost $12 million. Three second hug. Yeah.

I tried to long hug you earlier. You were like, the second time you got it today, not today. Or was it a mid hug the second time? Definitely mid. Okay. Semi by hug. I think you need a smother. This is called Aaron smothers you. Uh, it actually felt lovely. So, um, so then, you know, then you write down all the shit that's wrong, uh, all the shit that you could do to fix it.

And then you kind of like look at it more clinically, you know, because a lot of this stuff after you've been playing this game for a long time, it's not really that it doesn't have to be that emotional. It's really not about you. You might have made a mistake, but it's not about you. It doesn't mean you're a failure or not. So thankfully, I've been doing it a while and I feel that way. I think that, you know, the very first time I lost money or I had a business fail.

That felt like a me thing. It's scary. It's terrible. Yeah. Yeah. It's very scary. Something that you, I see you share about is about choosing your hard. And I think that that's a very meaningful statement and concept. How does one adapt that in their own lives? And what does that mean? Yeah. You know, my husband, I remember back in the day said to me, um, he basically said, um,

I didn't want to go to the gym for some reason. And, uh, he's, he kind of doesn't care, but we push each other. He pushes me a lot physically and I push him a lot. I think in business or financially bigger games, harder games, I'm kind of a marathoner. I can work a lot and he's a marathoner in fitness. He can just go crazy. And so, you know, early on he said, listen, it's hard being fat. It's hard being fit. Choose your heart. And, uh,

And I remember thinking about that for a moment. And when somebody says something like that to your immediate reaction, most people's immediate reaction is like, hey, fuck you. You know, like, but don't tell me what to do. And don't tell me that those are my only two options and that there's the same level of hard. But whenever I get feedback like that, I try to kind of like sit with it. Again, I probably like sit at my stomach for a second. I'm like, huh.

That seems true. You know, I remember Tucker Carlson said at a speech I was listening to of his in Arizona, he said that the truth is like a tuning fork. You don't just hear it, you feel it. It's like that vibration. Yeah.

And so every so often you get a little piece of feedback that's like a harsh truth or a hard truth. You know how people say that? And I think you actually feel those. You don't just hear them. So for that one, I felt it. I was like, you're right. It's all just chosen hard. And so now that is something I say to myself every day. It's a reminder to go to the gym. And it's also a reminder to like,

famous Mark Twainism, if you're gonna eat a frog, do it first thing in the morning. If you're gonna eat two, eat the big one first. - I like the two quotes come to mind. The one is easy decisions now, hard decisions later, and then vice versa.

And then the other one, I had another one, it's gone now. But coming into that place of being able to lean into the thing that is objectively very challenging, but having control and modulating your subjective experience of it is a superpower. - I think that's true.

I believe in God, my chosen God is Christianity. And there was another quote I loved that I sit with a lot, which is that worry, every time I get concerned, I remember that worry is practicing atheism. And in my mind, like, what do we know for sure? We're going to die. Like, we're all not going to make it. Nobody's going to make it forever.

And I sort of have a belief that like, is a belief helpful to you or not? And a belief that's helpful to me is, well, if I couldn't handle it, God probably wouldn't give it to me. And if God gave it to me, it means that he thinks that I can handle it.

So let's operate under that belief and let's have a little belief in something bigger than me, something that might be guiding. Do I know that to be true? No. But does it hurt me at all to think that? Absolutely not. I think it's super empowering. And so in a world in which we're increasingly sort of, you know, we're atheists or we're agnostics or, you know, a lot of people don't believe in organized religion or faith. I just ask myself a lot, does it help me? And that seems to help me.

Can you share a little bit about your background? You just recently did a book, "Main Street Millionaire," which I was surprised how much I liked it. It was actually very approachable and very exciting. And you have this enthusiasm in the way that you live and the way that you communicate because you are like a living embodiment of the things that you communicate about. And so it's, like I mentioned, we recorded on your podcast before that, it's like almost can be like intoxicating, which is great.

And so thank you for writing the book. Thank you. What is your history with, uh,

finances and some of the worlds that you've been exposed to as a, as a woman, which is kind of novel. You know what I think is cool is obsession is so contagious, like, and it's so rare today. You know, I don't know what happened where we thought that it was cool to not care. It's almost like, uh, uh, I'm a nihilist. I'm an existentialist. Nothing matters. You know, it's, I think you want to be, if you want to be sound sophisticated, act negative. If you want to make a lot of money, be positive. And, uh,

And so I think, you know, you're similar. Would...

Think about it, breath is so quote unquote normal. It's something we do every single moment of every single day continuously. If I was to speak to somebody who is not obsessed with breath, it's probably rather boring. Like I do it multiple times, I'm doing it right now, I'm breathing in, you're breathing out. Like how much could you talk about it? But if you talk to somebody who's obsessed with breath and how it could move you physiologically, it's fascinating. You're like, wait, what? There's all these different types? What do you mean? How does it does that? What does it do in your system?

Like you can get obsessed about anything. And so I think that is also what I've realized about this game of businesses. You know, people say I buy what I call boring businesses, Main Street businesses. And they'll say, how boring is that to own a laundromat or a car wash? But I think if you can see it through my eyes, then it opens up this kind of like Disneyland like wonder in the game that is business because it's really just another game. They all are. And there's actually no difference between owning Disneyland.

Tesla and owning a car wash. And like, hang with me for a moment. All of them have marketing, all of them have operations, all of them have finance, all of them have HR, logistics, distribution. It's basically the same. Now they sell a different widget to each person. Theoretically, one could get a lot bigger than the other, but there are multi, multi, multi-billion dollar car washes, and there is multi, multi, multi-billion dollar car companies. And I think what

we got kind of sold this lie on is that like the industry or sector that we're in really matters, but we can become experts and obsessed with just about anything. And I realized that because I've been in finance for a long time, you know, 15 years or something like that, that I've been an investor and a owner of small businesses. And during that time, you know, I went from Goldman Sachs to State Street to Vanguard, all these big finance companies learning how to invest and

And what I learned more than anything is that almost all business is the same. What's really interesting about business is solving problems. Like the bigger the problems and if you are able to solve them, the more interesting the business. And that your bank account is a direct representation of how fast you move and how big of problems you solve. Those two things will tell you how much money you're going to make.

And it was like going through thousands and thousands and thousands of businesses that I finally started to like see the matrix. You know how that happens? Probably like similar to you. You can see how a person is wired. You can almost, like it's like you can see their history from their body, right? - 100%. - And it's the same with business. When you looked at it a ton, you're like, "Ah, I've seen this play before. "Like I know exactly what's gonna happen there. "I bet you hurt there. "I bet you hurt there. "And I can do the same with a business. "I bet that's tough for you. "That margin's too high, huh? "Something off there."

And so these reps allow us to be perceived experts and see into the future. And so once I started realizing that, you have one of two ways you can go, right? One way that I could have gone is I could have continued in private equity and I could have built another billion dollar asset center management business. I built one in Latin America, a big business. So it's structured around BBLs?

Exactly. No, this was, this was in Chile where they don't do a lot of those. Not, no, Chileans are not. Have you been to Chile? They're like, they're more like Germans. Are they flat butted people? Yeah, they're, they're, they're whiteys. They got real. Yeah. They're more slow twitch glutes. Yes, very much so. Not interested. Not interested.

No, if you saw Chileans dance, which backed me up Chileans, they're like Germans. Germans also not known for dancing. But that was my biggest market back then. So we built this big business in Latin America and I saw into my future.

Like I looked down the line and I was like, oh, that's what an MD at this company looks like. That's what the CEO looks like. And I was like, oof, I don't like what I see. I don't want to become just another person who dies with a lot of paper. Right. Like you said. And so I realized I was pretty good at making money by now, coming from nothing to being OK at making it. And I'm like, huh. Like if it's true that all business is the same.

And if it's true that we can like get reps at business and any business could make billions of dollars, then why don't I pick something that I think is really impactful that I might be proud of putting on a tombstone? And so that's how I got into media was like,

Yeah, I could get rich quietly and I could build another private equity group and be another fucking guy on his third or fourth marriage with like Lambos to make up for the fact that not very physically fit, like unhealthy, drinking too much at Tao. Like I just seen it so many times. And I was like, or I could try to make a movement. And.

The movement is infinitely harder. It's harder to make money doing it this way. And you get a lot of pushback being on the internet. You know this too. There's like a lot of downsides to being public. But man, I think we've actually made a movement. And I only think you need 1% to 5% of a population in order to change a country. I wonder, I think what's most challenging for people, and I would fall into this category as well in a lot of ways,

is, you know, so there's like the statistic of just under 40% of Americans can't afford a surprise $400, uh,

You know, so people are like really living hand to mouth and like really struggling. And I don't know what the percentage of people that are, are drowning in credit card debt, but it is, but I'm sure it's very high. Um, for those people that are in a stressed survivor to use my breathing archetype language, uh, they're in a survival state and they're, you are so unattainable. Yeah. I think like the concept of you and the archetype of you is like great, but like I,

I'm, I don't, I'm in debt $20,000 or I'm barely scraping by and I have, you know, I finally have a thousand dollars in the bank and I can breathe a little bit. What about for those people as far as like picking themselves up by the bootstraps and becoming an owner? Yeah, it's a beautiful question. We actually started a series on YouTube called Main Street Millionaires for this exact same reason. You know, if you look at somebody like me, even though I came from

you know, bouncing back then we had checks that we actually use, you know, bouncing checks and not being able to have a, you know, a debit card without worrying that I was going to swipe it through and it wasn't going to work and, you know, making 30 K out of college and, um, kind of always having PTSD of some sort associated to the fact that I might not have enough cash to do what I wanted. I've been there. Um, you know, my dad didn't go to college. My mom was a special education teacher. Um,

I was a journalist. I didn't know dick about money. I thought a mutual fund was like mutual fun. We all have a good time together. I like that. And that seems like a great investment to me. Long hugs. Yeah, exactly. High ROI. Lots of hugging. That's what's included in the portfolio. Yeah, I literally, I didn't know any of this stuff. But we started this series covering...

what I'll call everyday Americans for this exact reason, because I have a belief that we are conditioned to be and programmed to be exactly as wealthy as we are. And it's 'cause I was too. - It's like your thermostat. - Yeah, I mean, if you think about it, money is the root of all evil. Why can't we all say that line? I can't remember, when was I first told that? How come when I go give a speech to 10,000 people, all of us can repeat the word?

I don't remember that like growing up. I think of money as fun tickets. Yeah. Yeah. But that's rare. Actually, that's rare. Most people when they think of money, they don't do this. They don't go abundant. It's everywhere. My hands are up. In fact, when most people think about money, they go like this. They go like this. They get real tight in their body.

And I think we were programmed that way. And actually the Bible says that the desire for money is the root of all evil. So if your entire life is structured around desire for money, that is the root of all evil. But we forgot some of the words there, real key. And actually that goes back to almost every major religious text. And in fact, the Bible talks about the fact that having debt is bad. So does the Koran. So does the Torah. And so for some reason, we have this

this culture around money. And I think it's because money is actually freedom.

And what do big, powerful societies not want their people to have? Freedom. And it's not necessarily because they're evil. It's because we're harder to control, right? They might even be because they're trying to make us safe, right? They don't think that we have our own agency or ability to handle things. So let me hand, it's okay. I got you. You don't want to destabilize the structure as it is. Exactly. And you trust yourself more than you trust your fellow human. And I actually, I don't.

And so my pushback is I want to open people's perception or their aperture of what's actually possible with money. And even if you are $20,000 in debt right now, even if you also think that a mutual fund is mutual fun, even if you don't actually understand the language that is money, which is okay, most of us do not, you can get this thing called ownership because it actually has nothing to do with money. It has to do with if you are right now,

a construction worker working on a, you know, a construction job, can you actually look a few paces ahead of you and not just think about career progression and salary and how could I make more hourly wage, but could you actually cozy up to those that are higher on the ladder, get to know the general contractor and how they work, and start asking them if they own part of the company. Who's in charge? Who owns what? And if you do own part of the company, how'd you get that?

Like, did you invest in it? Were you valuable? Did you buy it? I want people to get just as curious about ownership as they are about money. Because I do think when you are curious about something, it's the Tony Robbins-ism, where your attention goes, your energy flows, and that's where your outcomes come. And so what I would say is don't get caught up on the idea of having to buy a business right now. Get really caught up on this idea of, can I figure out how to get in the only 6% of Americans who own businesses?

businesses, very small percentage. And can I get around more of them? It's just like with everything, it actually is a little bit contagious. I want to take a moment and share about something I have found to be pretty interesting technology to prevent and offset some of the negative effects of non-native EMFs. Those tricky frequencies that we're getting exposed to with our cell phones and with our computers and Wi-Fi and 5G and all the different things. I find Leela

quantum tech to be pretty interesting for this stuff. I am generally pretty suspicious of things that suggest mitigating EMF and things like, but what I like about Lula Quantum is they have a ton of research around it. Actually, we've also done a podcast with the founder of the company. So you tune back and listen to that.

I'm going to read off some of the research they have that I find interesting. Leela Quantum's tech blocks can boost ATP, which is known as the energy currency in our bodies, production by 20 to 29%. Associate professor at the University of Tulsa, Dr. Robert Scheef, performed three randomized double-blind studies, placebo-controlled, and found that ATP production rates consistently jump by up to 20 to 29% in all treated groups.

which by itself is a medical breakthrough. He has also found an acceleration of wound healing of 85 to 100% in human cells. Super interesting. They have 59 studies done, which are third party. And I'm just very intrigued by this technology. I think that there's some interesting stuff here. I think it's worth checking out. I really like the necklace, the heel necklace they use. They also have blocks. They have clothing. They have a lot of really interesting stuff. And

You can try yourself, see what you think, see if you notice a difference and you get 10% off by going to leelaq.com slash align. That's L-E-E-L-A-Q.com slash align. What would your recommendation be for a person to be able to cozy up with folks that they aspire to be more like? Because I think that's something probably like, I would imagine your experience being like a public figure, you probably get a lot of like,

cozy invites cozy and let me take you out for a cup of coffee long hugs don't do that yeah yeah no no pick my coffee don't pick my brain don't do that yeah that's a terrible also talk about terrible imagery like no even if I liked you that sounds awful pick my brain yeah um

Well, one, I wouldn't go after public people. We're not who you want. We have too much distraction around us. Who do you actually want instead? You want to go to the person who probably not that many people want to talk to. This might be your boss. It might be your boss's boss. It might be your friend's dad who has a little bit more money than your family has. It might be that idea from Robert Kiyosaki of your rich dad versus your poor dad. How can you kind of go around to the people that you know that are richest in your life? Okay.

And what are you going to want to do? You don't want to ask them for their money. You don't want to ask them a broad question like how they did it. You just want to say, hey, I want to be more successful in life. Can I talk to you about how did your journey transpire? If they're not that open to that, you might go way smaller. Hey, I saw that your title is this. What does your company do? One, you want to show curiosity because it's really rare.

And then two, you want to ask for one tiny piece of advice to start. What book would you recommend that I read? Like what book has influenced you in business more than anything else? Then you're going to do the rarest of all things. You're going to read the fucking book and you're going to go back to them. You're going to say like one or two sentences, which is, hey, I read that book that you talked about.

Thank you. Here's three things I thought were really interesting from it. I also had a question. Then you ask them a question. What you're doing is you're building a relationship with doers to show that you're one of them. You're not rich or an owner yet, but you're a doer and you are willing to do the work.

And eventually, after you do this a few times to a few people, competency is incredibly sexy and it's incredibly contagious. And so if they see a young person who is highly competent, who keeps asking for more, and who eventually maybe asks them, "Is there like any work I can do for you? Is there something, you know, I'm not even worth you paying me right now maybe? Can I just help this little thing on the side?"

What's going to happen is not everybody. There's plenty of bad and mean rich people, but you're going to find one or two out of 10 that are going to see themselves in you. They're going to be like, man, this was me when I was 20. This was me when I

when I was 30. Yeah, come along for this. You want to come see what I do for a day? And that is the entryway to I think what is the real Harvard, which is being around people who are owners and really rich, not people who come from money and who have credentials. We shouldn't chase credentials. We should chase ownership. What about offering favors? Is that like something that would be supportive? Because that's always something that I think about. Like if I'm around...

a person, it probably comes from some parts of self-worth or whatever within myself, but I want to be able to quote unquote provide value for that person during that timeframe. And so the idea of, and for some people being a mentor, putting the mentor hat could be the value for that person, but that wouldn't be everybody at that month or stage in their life. So is that something that one would be thinking about of how can I provide value for this person?

Yeah. Well, one, I'm really careful on the word mentor because that can feel overwhelming. Especially if they don't know you, you know, and if they're really not bought in on you, you don't want to put that label on them because that's a big label. That's like, oh my God, I have to usher and guide you through life in order for you to achieve your goals. Yeah.

tight, right? But if instead it's like, oh, I answer one question in an email, that's it. Very low lift from me. Okay. I can manage that. That's interesting. And then do it for years and years. In fact, I did it with a guy by the name of Bob Kendall back in the day. He was a, I don't remember. I don't remember if he was at Credit Suisse. Anyway, he was at one of the really big banks. And I can't remember if I first met him at Credit Suisse or Goldman, but Bob, who we call BK, is the man. And he was like, you

you know, this guy's making tens of millions of dollars a year. He's really big in finance. Everybody wants a little piece of him in my corporate realm. And I did this exact same thing. I just would get a chance to ask him one question. Hey, article. Hey, I saw you did this. This is really interesting. Very short emails. Very to the point. And I did it over the course of years until finally I remember one day Bob and I had become close by then and he was a good confidant of mine. Then I remember we were in New York and I was like, hey, do you have time to grab lunch? I'm here, you know, da, da, da.

And we sat down and he goes, you know, it's kind of weird. Like what? He's like,

I really care about your future and the outcomes that you have from it. He's like a very serious guy. So I think he was like almost confused as to why he cared after having so many people around him. And he was like, that was very like clever how now I'm like very bought into the things you want to do. And I said, well, why do you think that is? And he said to me the same thing. He said, because can I tell you how many times I've recommended a book over my friends?

30, 40 year career and how many times people have read them. He's like, it's less than two hands. So 40 years, 10 people had even read a book from somebody that they wanted to mentor them. And so your bar is actually much lower than you think if you're, if you act and you've seen this firsthand because you work with all these celebrities, uh,

Well, why do you think they work with you? Probably because you give them your area of expertise pretty quick, your value add. You're like, hey man, can I just like, let me work on that shoulder. Is that bothering you? Yeah, they have a very specific problem that I have a solution for and I can usually solve it

to some at least like degree that creates buy-in within 30 minutes, which is, you know, that's really nice. Which is, I think, a really valuable thing to do. We have a strategist that works for us, Jamie, and he's a YouTube strategist. And the way that he got in with me

originally is he sent me unsolicited about, I don't know, a three page breakdown of all the things I was fucking up on YouTube, all the things he would do different if he was in my shoes, a couple ideas, fully fleshed out, fully scripted, and then said, Hey, I don't expect anything from you. I don't need anything. I'm good at YouTube. I'm like a 20 year old crazy kid. Uh, here's this. If I can be of any service to you, please let me know. So he sent me that and I was like, this is great.

get on a phone call with me. And then of course I paid him from there on out and now we're buddies. But I think if you are skilled, applying your skills is such a good hack. If you're not skilled curiosity until you become skilled, then skilled leads to value. And I think that's very true. And the last story I'll tell is I remember when I first met

Vivek Ramaswamy, it was before he was running for president, but he wasn't like huge then. He was just kind of breaking out. And I ran into him at a friend's conference, POMPS, and I spoke right after him. And I thought he had, you know, you just meet people and you're like, I don't

I don't know if he's going to win the presidential race, but he's going to be really important for the future of this country. And I like some of his ideas. So I remember we're back in the green room. And now most people, what would they do if they, you know, they would kind of like jockey to be important or whatever to this person, which I saw some other people. It's very beta. Yeah, it's very beta. They would stick out their chest. And instead, I was like, tell me what you guys are trying to do. Like, tell me about you. So I just asked him some questions. And I talked to his staffers.

And they were like, yeah, social media. That's our big push. I'm like, incredible. His Twitter looked good. I liked his Twitter. I pulled up his Instagram and I was like, huh. I was like, is Instagram a focus? And it was like, this is a little nerdy technical for people that like social media. But you know when like an old person does an Instagram post and it's like horizontal style, it's like one third of the screen, you know? And then it's like a weird face they have for the first intro. And you know, it's like everything's off about it. It would be like if I was on my dad's Instagram.

And I was like, you want to do social media, but this is what's happening. I'm like, listen, give me your email and I'm going to send you a rundown of how my team would do it. So we did this whole big thing for him, shipped it to him. And since then, then he was like, can you fly out and can you help us with XYZ? And so we did. So I think that value add, I didn't actually, I don't want anything from him. I don't have...

have anything to do with a presidential candidate. I'm not trying to run for office in any way, shape or form. But I was like, you know what? He has a lot of value in the world. Let me help him in this one area. And I know that helping one person like that will probably eventually be helpful for me. How do you see people burn relationships in unexpected ways and be able to look back and like,

Hmm. I have a bunch of burnt bridges, you know, six years later. Like, how did that happen? I wasn't the intention. Like, how did, how do you see that commonly happen? There's a lie that we were told that I think is pervasive for us. And that is, if you don't ask, you'll never receive. And that is true. But if you ask too much, you'll also never receive. And I think what people don't realize is sometime an ask should be a give. And so I have many, a friendship that,

You know, we all have these friends, right? They're like always asking you for something. You know, it's like, hey, even just back in the day when I was younger, can I borrow this? Can I borrow that? And after a while, you're like, fuck, man, every time it's something. And then as you get bigger and especially if you guys are trying to connect with like people in positions of power, just imagine that amplified. Everybody kind of wants something from you at some point. And people in that position have a specific detection mechanism that arises just through repetition. Yeah.

Yes, that's very true. They're hypersensitive to the point that their filter could actually be even be hypersensitive, like overly tuned.

Totally. So it has to be, you have to be even more cautious with it. Yeah, I think that's right. And it, um, it's probably burned them somehow before. And so it's, it's like you're touching a pain point, which probably creates a, like a potential sensation of like loneliness and disconnection with that person. So there's actually kind of, it's kind of interesting how that can happen. You can get to a point where, you know, you aspire to be in this place and then you arrive in that place, but now suddenly you can't trust anyone and you feel alienated and separate. It's a separate thing. No,

- No, I think it's true. I mean, it's a Russian proverb, trust but verify. So I always believe that like, it's like we'll allow a lot of people quote unquote in,

but to the foyer. Yeah. You know, not all the way into the house. Yeah. It's like, let's be really kind and open with our front patio. Let every trick or treater come along and grab whatever snacks they want. But like, if you're going to get into the next room and then the next room, that's probably going to be a little bit more screening. And so, yeah, I think, I think it is that it is. And we see it all the time. I mean, think about it in your DMS probably. It's like, um, a lot of times people, a lot of dick pics. Yeah.

Thanks. Yeah, mine too. Oddly, oddly, yeah. No, mostly it's feet request pics, which is like the weird- I do every now and again, you know, somebody will send a photo. Really? Press open, bam, dick. Are you serious? Every now and again. That's wild. Yeah. I don't know who are your followers. You guys are a bunch of sickos out there. I don't know, a bunch of sickos. Or maybe it's really giving. Maybe it's a lovely dick pic. Could be like an anatomical thing. You know?

They're like, "Is my breath off?" So yeah, so I think that whole like any chance you get that give first as opposed to ask is so clever. And like you did it today at the podcast, you brought like a little gift and that's probably just-- - I come bearing gifts. - Yeah, that's subconscious for you at this point, I bet. But it is really memorable.

Probably not very expensive and shows hey, I'm not trying to I'm not trying to take anything here I'm actually really appreciative of your moment in your time and in a world a big deal. Nobody does a huge deal Yeah, maybe like the biggest like ever seeing every interaction with ultimately anyone Because I think it all adds up in different ways But particularly, you know the the interactions that where it's someone has something that you desire information, you know knowledge whatever the thing is

Not doing that is probably the fastest way for them to sever that connection. - Yeah, it's very true. You know, and you, car salesmen know it better than anything. It's the law of reciprocity, right? So if you want to get into psychology and manipulation, then the law of reciprocity says, well, if I give somebody something, we have a human inclination that we want to give something back. And so,

I think that can be transparent in some way too, which is why I don't take a lot of favors, for instance. So that is another way that you can burn bridges is like try to push a favor on somebody. Because the truth of the matter is favors can be expensive. And sometimes I think about the old mafia bosses that were like, I'm going to do you a favor. You're like, no, you're not. No favor. I don't want one. And so it's this balance of...

can we give sort of a little bit more joyously and that actually giving is probably better for the giver than the receiver. - A lot of the most successful people that I know, they operate under a kind of rule that I've heard you mention on another podcast. It was like the 10X rule of I'll only ask for pretty much a 10th of what I give.

And so once you achieve a certain point where it's like, bro, I've just like poured so much, whatever, whatever the form of energy that has been poured, like you were so filled, your cup is so filled. Then from there, it's like, by the way,

You think you could connect me with so-and-so? Like, what do you think? Like no pressure. And if it's not a fit, that's another thing. It's like when you, I think if you're, if you're asking a favor and it's like, you're not giving them the person an out, you know, it's more just like presenting. It would be helpful, but like absolutely no attachment. I understand, you know, just providing a lot of space, I think for a person. Yeah. And trying to think about how it could be a win for them even. I often think about,

You know, if I was going to ask for a connection to somebody, let's say, I might say, hey, I noticed that X person is interested in this. Yeah, it has to make sense. Yeah, right. It has to make sense. It has to feel like net beneficial. And it might not make sense today. Maybe it makes sense in six months or maybe two years. It just doesn't make sense right now.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the flip side of it is the more successful that you want to get, the more you have to be comfortable saying no. I mean, I think when you're young and you don't have a lot going on, it's yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Yes, opportunity. Yes, more work. Yes, more tasks. The more you say no when you're young and haven't made it, the less successful you're going to become. And actually, it's really friction driving and annoying for people who are more successful that you eventually want more things from.

And so young people hate this. And if you're a young person that hates this advice, I'd say it's probably why you're not where you want to be in life. And that is you have to stop saying no to hard work things when you're young.

This is your time to shine. This is the time to work harder than you want for longer than you want doing things you don't want to do and then I can almost guarantee you that if you do that for your 20s your 30s are gonna be really you're gonna be sitting pretty. What do you think of specialization versus generalization in your 20s? I think you can't be you can't work smarter until you know how to work harder and so I think one of the issues with specialization is do you know what you want to specialize in? Like do you really know what you're good at yet?

I think if you found something you're obsessed with, that's hard to beat. Obsession's really hard to beat. And so if you are specializing because you're like, God, I am obsessed with sales. I'm like, no matter what, I'm always like, I'm always trying to figure out how I could get more, you know, I want to be the best salesperson I could get because I'm obsessed. Amazing. If you're doing it because you think some specialization earns more money than another specialization, probably not as necessary. Because what'll happen is if you just keep working hard, you're going to start to see

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Something that I find interesting is if you are in a place where, I wonder at what point does developing the mindset of

creating wealth makes sense to apply because I think there's a certain point where you can have enough savings or investments where you can start to redefine your perception of Finances and money a little bit where you realize that money makes money and money itself is a business in it of itself And it's it's a garden and you can be you know plowing the fields and tending to that almost as like a separate business And then you can have your trade

as the other business. But at what point, what like...

sum of money, does it make sense to start developing like a wealth based mindset? Well, I like I think there's four steps to making money. And the first step is really learning. Like before you do anything else, you should be obsessing as much of your time and money on learning and increasing your skill stack. So you want to have the most valuable skills so that whoever pays you is going to pay the highest dollar amount possible. That's like your first level. Then the second level is... You just said sex. I did say sex.

We got it on the podcast. No long hug, but Freudian slips, baby. Oh man. And you said balls on the last podcast too. So we're really, this is degraded fast basically. But the next level after learn, I'm going to plow right through that is, uh, was that also a sex joke? I think I just did a sex joke. Oh, nice. Yeah, that was good. That was rad. All right. Uh,

So after you learn, you want to go to earn. So that's where you're saying, all right, I've increased my skill set enough. Now I want to figure out how can I get paid the most humanly possible for this role? So let's go to all the different spots that I can to make more money. And every single game has a different way to earn.

After you earn, then I think you can get to invest. And so I don't think it's a set dollar amount. How much? There's not a set dollar amount. Because I think you could probably, it would be wise. You're the money person. Don't listen to me about money. But I think it would be wise to apply that wealth-based mindset, which to me, wealth-based mindset is awareness that your money earns money and your money is energy. It's not just a thing. It's like something I did for a long time.

Was living in scarcity and living in fear stood still doing lots of ways unwinding a lot old stuff always waiting for the shoe to drop Yeah, you know But I would I literally would stash away Thousands of dollars like I can a bed Like a safety box in my house as like okay just in case, you know at one point I mean it doesn't matter how much was but like way more than is necessary and it was make you perform better and feel better and

No, I think it was like a clot in my system. It was like literally like I have stagnation and clotting energy in my like like like my financial circulation through my body. Yeah, it was excessive protection as opposed to allowing the energy of that currency to breathe and engage and like grow and expand. It was almost like I was like taking it out of the sunshine because I was it was like this fear. I was like a shut in. Yeah.

Does that make sense? Very much so. I mean, this is, this goes back to a couple different things. Very prevalent for people who live during the Great Depression, right? Hoards lots of cash. This guy. Yeah. Probably not. No. Had some weird like instability in the home life. There you go. I think that like sudden instability that kind of created, I believe probably for like my young boy version of myself, a fear that like it can all fall apart at any time. Yeah. And I think most of us who think about money at all have that. So my answer was, I

I need to learn how to make as much money as humanly fucking possible because I never want to suffer from not having it again. I never want the embarrassment of not being able to pay for a thing. I never want somebody to tell me you can't do that or you have to do that because I have no money. Like I want control over my life. And so my clot was actually just earn more. Like I'm just going to keep earning. So nobody will ever be able to control me because I control money. Yeah.

there's positives to that, but there's also negatives. And then yours could be the opposite side, which is nobody's ever going to control me monetarily again because I have all this money and nobody can take it from me and it's hidden. And if somebody messes with me, this is my fuck you fund and I'm fine. So I'm not sure one's bad or good. It's just like awareness of it.

And then... The Psychology of Money is very interesting. That's a great book, by the way, as well. It is a good book. Yeah, I mean, one of the things about The Psychology of Money that I think is interesting, too, is like the words we use. Mm-hmm.

Net worth, for instance. Yeah, it's kind of nasty. It's kind of nasty. I don't like it. I don't like performer either. And when someone says performer and net worth, all that stuff, it kind of, my body, you said truth, you feel truth viscerally. To me, it kind of makes me go a little like. Well, it's true because I get asked a lot, what's your net worth? And originally I used to answer it. And then I got to a point where I was like, it's just, it's numbers on a screen for something that you could,

manipulate many ways from sideways to change what those numbers look like. It's like, how much cash do I have on hand? How much are my companies valued at? Who's valuing the companies? How much revenue the companies do? How much profit the companies do? How many companies I have? Lots of ways to do it. And then I saw so many people manipulate it that I was just like,

I don't think I want to play this game. Plus, I don't think when you Google Cody Sanchez worth, my dollar amount should come up. That's like a weird thing. So of course we have a reaction to money because it's actually saying Aaron is worth this. There is this dollar amount on him. And what if you lose all that money? Then what is Aaron worth? Well, not that much. That's really not true. It's very sad. Yeah. And so I think it's a lot of contraction. Yeah. I think within the self, it's like, it's like, uh, you know,

It's not an easy way to live life if you're basing your worth around the digital number that could really disappear any time. Yeah. And especially when you think about the fact that most people only get a pay increase of three to five percent per year. So it's like I've worked for 365 days this year. I've worked for 300 days this year and my worth has only increased by three percent. I feel like I've worked harder than that. You know, so there are all of these feelings we have about money that I think are real.

But if we recognize them and we can try to like try on a few different philosophies and you could try this on with me. And one philosophy is that you're never limited by the amount of money you have. You're only limited by your knowledge of money.

Because money is all around. And one thing I know for positive from being around a bunch of ridiculously rich people is they play a game called allocating capital, which is like they sit on piles of paper and they are always looking for ways to put the paper out into the world and have the paper come back with more friends. And if you know that, then what is actually scarce? It's not money. It's like assets.

access to things that people want to part their money for. And so that might mean, can you go and can you find a business for them to invest in? Can you give them an opportunity to invest in you in something that you're doing? And that opportunity and investment is how rich people think about money. They don't think expense and spend. And that is probably the big difference.

from being wealthy of the mind and poor of the mind, which is, do you think of spend and expenses or do you think of how do I get opportunities and investments from money? It's hard to break through. What are your thoughts on investments? If you were looking at different sectors, perhaps would be the term, but if you're looking at

I have some money saved and working really hard. Should I get into real estate? Should I get into equities or stock market? Should I get into investing in a business? Is investing in stocks kind of like, I mean, it literally is investing in a business. Is one better than the other? Like what should a person start doing with a little bit of money? They say they got a hundred thousand bucks saved up or 50,000 bucks saved up. Yeah. Here's how I think about the games you could play with money. So

So the game of real estate is really a game to offset taxes and to increase the value of your assets. So like the game of real estate is preservation and tax manipulation. That's the game of real estate. Most real estate, you're putting down a pretty hefty sum.

So the down payment, plus you have some sort of mortgage or loan on top of it for a very small amount of monthly cash flow. So the average house, single family home in the U.S. is somewhere around $400,000. And the average income from a house, like net income, the money cash flow, the money you put in your pocket is about $150 a month. So you're putting- Super low. Very low. Yeah.

Now, you could manipulate that. You could do Airbnb on top of it. You could fix and flip the property. There are things you could do to manipulate that. But on a dollar-for-dollar percentage, real estate isn't great for cash flow unless you have a ton of cash or access to capital.

And so that's one way to think about it. It's really good for wealth preservation, making sure it stays there long term, making sure you have tax benefits. Then you've got stocks. Stocks are really a way to beat inflation. So over time, we know that the government prints more money. And if you look back since the beginning of the Fed to now, they've eaten away about 75% of the original value of a dollar.

So that means that we want to have some exposure to stocks because we want to protect ourselves from what the government does, which is continue to inflate our money and make it worth less. Then you have bonds. Bonds are just preservation plus income. So that's like, you know, if the average bond pays three and a half percent, the stock market makes about 10 percent. Bonds are basically like, huh, I don't want my money sitting in my pocket.

bed or my cabinet or my safe like Aaron's was. So I want them to make a little bit of money on them, but there is a quote unquote guarantee that they will give my money back to me and I'll make a little bit of money as we go. That's bonds. And then you have startups, in my opinion, investing in startups, which is called venture capital or angel investing. That's really good when you've made, I think at least your first million.

So I don't like investing in-- - It's risky. - It's very risky, yeah. You have a 90/10 principle, 90% loss, 10% win. Those 10% are supposed to make up for the 90% with 100X returns. The problem is that's really, venture capital is a proximity game. There's a very small amount of unicorns or really big companies, billion dollar companies that are created. Most of those unicorn companies exist in really three spheres, three locations in the US.

And those fears are dominated by people who are in the know with each other. It's a highly networked game. It doesn't matter for real estate if you know people, if you buy a single family home here and the asset produces, who cares who you know? It doesn't really matter. That's not true with venture capital. It's highly networked.

So that's a great game if you want to take home run swings. You're going to have like, I don't know, you're going to have a batting average that's really low, but you might have a few that are huge outliers. So we're only going to play that game after we're pretty safe. And then

Business ownership in my opinion investing in businesses is the highest likelihood for cash flow Which is the Main Street millionaire? This is yeah, it doesn't have to be buying businesses I like buying businesses for a myriad of reasons we could talk about that But this game of business is one of the only games where you can cash flow consistently every single month because it trades not only the money that you invest but your time and expertise and

And it trades those with a huge upside potential or what's called asymmetric upside, the ability to continue to earn with unlimited cap. Real estate, capped. Equity, technically not capped, but very unlikely for you to have 100, 200, 300, 400, 500X returns. Bonds, capped. Business, not capped. And so if you think about investing, you might want to have a little mix of all of those. But if you could bet on one thing,

Bet on yourself because you have the highest ROI of anything you do, which is why I like the game of business. So getting, so that feels like a exciting yet daunting thing to enter into a realm of walking into a dry cleaner or talking to your cleaner cleaning lady or any of that.

you mentioned different levels of business to invest in. Most people that would listen to this, I would imagine would be in like, I think it's, is it stage one or sector one that you refer to it? - Yeah. - Can you explain that? 'Cause it sounds really interesting and it's something I've thought about a lot over the years and I've never done.

But getting a few vending machines or getting a few ATMs or investing in a laundromat or something like that where it's something where it's kind of like ideally, hopefully a little bit turnkey-ish. You mentioned in the book a lot about the boomers that are in this transition place. That's something that is interesting information as well. Old people are getting older. There's a lot of them.

they hold a lot of the wealth in the country through their businesses and just through the inevitability of age, they probably would love to bestow that business on some young whippersnapper that has all this energy.

It's a pretty interesting concept because most of my mind has been more geared towards like, should I get real estate or should I get crypto or should I get stock or should I invest back in my own business? But have creating some of these other systems that you could ideally set up to be kind of like autopilot and you build enough of those and then you have, you could hire an operator that's supporting that. It's pretty smart.

I don't hear, I don't hear like a lot about that. I feel like you're, you probably are like popularizing that, I guess, in like the main, main, mainstream world. Yeah. I mean, we, listen, I, when I started talking about this three and a half years ago, um, I got a lot of crap for it on the internet because people who are in private equity do not want this normalized. Ownership and acquisition of businesses is the largest wealth creation, uh, activity of anything that is, that is done by society. Historically, it has been in the hands of the few.

If you look at the Forbes 400 list and you see the people on that list, there is less than 10% on that list that hasn't gotten there through some form of acquisition. That might mean Carl Icahn, an activist investor that actually acquires companies publicly, but by pushing them on deal structuring in unique ways. That might be Warren Buffett, who buys companies overall. That might be Jeff Bezos, who yes, started Amazon, but has done over 200 acquisitions inside of Amazon.

Even Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook, with his acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp, the likes of which, if he hadn't acquired those two things, Facebook would be a very different company today. Those have kept relevancy for the business for a long time. And so I'm trying to democratize this idea of why do we have to only let the really, really rich own our things? Mm-hmm.

Why does private equity and Wall Street have to be the only intermediary that can do a business transaction? And let me tell you why I think that's so silly. Back in the 1800s, 80% of Americans owned a business. 80%. Today, 6%. We have basically let them siphon away our ownership.

Over the years with this idea of safety from employment now. I actually have nothing I don't think there's anything wrong with employment employment's incredible. I made most of my early money I made my first millions as an employee great job No risk learned a ton learned on their dime made mistakes expensive ones on their dime made millions That's a great fucking trade-off but

At some point, while I was there, I started investing in stuff that we were doing at the firm. I took my money and I got ownership with it because that's what we learn in finance. But only finance learns this. Finance and venture capital, the two most highly skilled, highly paid sectors in the U.S., learn the game of ownership and nobody else does.

And so I thought that was wrong, actually. And so when I started talking about it, I was like, well, let me see. I've bought a bunch of businesses. So I'm not a genius, which I think means that a bunch of other people could buy businesses in the same way. Let's test that. So I basically went out, started talking online about buying businesses, gave examples. Here's how to do it. Here's playbooks. Here's guides. And then we had hundreds and then thousands of people learn how to buy businesses. And I realized, oh,

This is a repeatable task. It is not just for private equity. It can be done across the board. Now, it's not easy. It's hard work. And there's risk. But I don't think you can spell rich without risk. You have to have some risk in hand if you want to make real money. You have to be comfortable with the idea that you might lose something or you'll never make it, which means you never...

you lost it before you even got it. So that's where I got this original idea. But what I would say to somebody like you and anybody who's listening who has a trade or a skill, before you go look for a laundromat or a dry cleaner, which is what I did because what was my skill? My innate skill was private equity and investing. I knew how to do the skill of finding businesses and analyzing them. I actually

didn't know how to run anything else besides a private equity firm at the time, right? So in private equity, if you look at like Sun Capital, a very large private equity firm, if you look at their portfolio, it's like airplane hanger company, light company, juice company. It's every fucking thing you can imagine. No sector specificity. And so that was normal for me. That's not that normal on the internet. People don't talk about that, but private equity firms do that. For somebody like you, I would put you in our perfect

fit company Venn diagram. And I would say, all right, what does Aaron already touch right now today that he could own a part of with as little risk as possible, as little money as possible, and as much synergy as possible? So for instance, we're sitting in a podcast studio that you don't own, but you film here each week.

And there's probably some real estate component of this. There's probably a cash flow component of this. I bet if you started talking about the place that you record and you put it in your socials more frequently and you asked the guy who runs it, Ryan, if you could own part of this with him, if you brought X number of clients that drove his revenue to Y, he might ponder that deal for you. Yeah.

And if it got too big, you could do it in another place. And could you make some introductions to him? That's called a partial sweat equity acquisition. And so I want people to start thinking about deals that are all around them to start. You don't have to go buy something third party entirely. And then after you've sort of looked all around you, what you'll see is that it's not that there haven't been businesses around you that you could buy or own part of for most of your life. It's that your opportunity set will always be limited by your ability to see it.

And just like you can see a body in a certain way and know what's happening in that body, once you start looking at businesses and deals, you'll start to see them everywhere. Again, it goes back to the matrix. And then you'll be like, huh, I wonder if I should talk to my podcast production guy. And just like, that seems like a, there's probably not a lot of ways that deal goes sideways for me. Maybe I put a little tiny bit of money in, but I get it back in like three months with the way I structure the deal. Let's do that deal.

And then your next one might be like, huh, I'm going to go to Miami next. I'm going to do the same thing there. Let's see if I can't structure that deal. Interesting. You know? And then you start to ask the people who work with you, hmm, who else is in our sphere? Who else do we pay things to? Who else do we spend money at? Who else could we affect the outcome for what they're doing materially? Let's see if we could get a small piece of those businesses. And then the ownership becomes like a stock and that you get dividends. You get what's called distributions. What if a person doesn't...

a lot of things like that become a lot easier if you have access to hundreds of thousands of people on social media. What about for most people that, that don't, that are thinking, how could I provide value for this, for this place in a way that I could perhaps integrate with these as opposed to having the perception of like,

I don't have anything to offer and I'm just gonna kind of keep that separation, but just opening oneself up to the possibility seems like a very valuable thing. There's something that you mentioned in the book, "The Main Street Millionaire" was the Lindy effect, which is, can you explain Lindy effect and how that pertains to this? - Yeah, so there's an effect that will tell you statistically significantly whether a business will continue to survive or whether it will fail.

And that effect is called the Alindi effect. And basically what happens is they've done study after study showing that the longer something has been in existence, in this instance of business, the higher the likelihood it will continue to be in existence. And this runs counter to what we think because right now we think, ooh, AI startups, hot. I bet a bunch of them are going to succeed. So what do you do? You see a bunch of people plow money into AI startups.

Well, that's actually a really bad idea from a Lindy effect perspective. What that means is that they're brand new, so probably what you're going to have is a few outliers that own a ton of the market share and 90% that

that die miserably and fast. And so instead, you want to go to a business and look at the failure rate of businesses and see, huh, if the business has been in existence for more than five years, it already is at a 55% less likelihood of failing by just surviving those first five years. You can almost think about it like a kid back in the day, you

You know, newborns had a really high death rate through human history. And yet the older the child got, somewhere between, let's call it zero and 10, the more likely the child would continue to survive, right? And that's the same thing with the business. It's like it's gone through its kamikaze, really dangerous years, and eventually is at a point where it's kind of stabilized, at least to non-failure rate. It doesn't mean you can't fail. It just means you're less likely to.

- Would you suggest investing, I already kind of asked this before, if you have a little bit of money saved up, 50 grand, 100 grand, maybe half a million bucks, would you suggest,

I would assume diversifying your portfolio so that you have more of a sensation of safety. I would assume probably something like dollar cost averaging into some index funds. I would assume maybe investing in like some metals and such, like just in case. I would assume maybe owning some real estate and trying to divorce, diversify that portfolio in case things kind of like upturn or downturn, whatever, or downturn.

At what point would it make sense to invest in a small business? You know what I mean? Like do you first want to kind of diversify things or can you just go all in, I'm just going to do the business? - Well, I wouldn't, let's do it this way.

If we're talking about one, here's how I do it. I won't tell anybody else how to do it for themselves, but here's what I do. One, I like to have a year of cash on hand in case anything goes sideways. Cash could be like bonds or easily liquid alternatives. I want to know that if the world goes crazy, I'm going to be okay for a year. Some people are okay with a six month emergency fund. That's just me. I'm a shoebox guy. Yeah. Okay.

over a year. Okay, there you go. That's probably unnecessary, but okay, you do you. We'll work with you on that. Things that would be easily liquefiable would be the thing. great. So, so that's me. Now, anything past that, here's how I like to think about it.

stop thinking that it has to be your money. Your first deal shouldn't probably be all your money. Mine was like, I don't know, less than 1% of my worth in my first deal. So if I bought a laundromat for a hundred K, like it was just, if I lost a hundred K, I'd be sad. I don't want to lose a hundred K. That doesn't feel nice, but it wouldn't have ruined me. And I want to make sure like,

For my first deals, at least, I don't want my first deal to be able to bankrupt me or ruin me. So what would that mean? That would mean that I want to learn how to get other people to invest in the deal with me. I want to learn how to do seller financing into a deal so that the owner of the business sells the business to me and helps me finance the business through the business's future profits.

I want to get together with a small group of other investors. I'm not going to put my full 100K in. I'm going to put in 10, and I'm going to get five other people to put in 10, and we're going to all own part of this business. But since I found the deal and I'm going to run the deal, I'm going to own 51%. They're going to own the rest, and we'll let the seller finance the deal for some part of it. So I want us to start thinking almost like private equity and Wall Street does. The main

Even private equity GPs, general partners is what they call people who run those funds, they don't put all of their money into the deals. They go out to a group of people where the money, if they lost it, would be sort of irrelevant, and they bring them into the deals. And that's what we should be doing individually. It also allows us to diversify away from the stock market. Here's why this is really important. Companies are going public later than ever.

So, historically, companies went public and we got to recoup a bunch of the money that the companies made through the public stock market. Well, now, because there's a lot more regulation, it's a lot more expensive to go public. Companies are staying private. Myriad of other reasons, too, but that's a large one. The problem is most of the money is made, not most of the money, a lot of the money is made when the companies are private companies.

Now we've sort of taken a lot of the profits out of before normal people like you and me can invest in the stock market. So we have this huge period of time where

The only people that make a lot of money are private equity companies. So we need to be able to get into this phase of earnings. And we do that by buying private companies in the same way that these private equity companies buy them. I mean, for instance, there's a company called Mr. Car Wash. That company before it went public, it traded hands like four times, four different private equity companies, all made hundreds of millions of dollars on that one company.

So they sort of soaked a bunch of the profits out of it. Then they made the company go public. The company did a big pop on the public IPO. Kind of has come down quite a bit since then. And so that's how I would think about it. Don't use your last dollars. In fact, spend way more time learning about how to get other people to take some risk alongside you. Then after you do the first business, now you're making a couple hundred thousand dollars a year. You've got a business under your belt. You're motoring. Now you're like, oh, I feel more confident. I'm going to put in a bigger chunk. Mm-hmm.

But stair step your way into the shallow water. What about investing in yourself, investing in education, investing in your own business? I feel like there could be a very strong possibility of diluting your energy by looking out and not realizing like you are the most valuable business asset that you have.

Yeah. I mean, my friend Alex Hormozy calls it the S and me 500. So like, yeah, investing in yourself before you invest in anything else. I do think the highest ROI you're ever going to have is on yourself because you have infinite time horizon for it. And you have, again, asymmetric upside. You have

unlimited earnings potential. And so if you could spend on anything, you should spend on education to start, but real education. Like I think these days we spend on credentials, not education. There's a big difference. I don't care if you went to Harvard or not. I want to know, did you learn how to do M&A properly? That's why we started an academy. Like I started an education institute because my mom was a 30 year special education teacher. She

She got me obsessed with learning and obsessed with reading. And because of that, I got skilled pretty quickly and I learned how to ask a lot of questions as a journalist and then grew my way through finance. I want to do that same thing for people learning M&A. And so I think we should take the education system back from universities. We're already starting to do that in a big way, at least from the big, expensive, private universities. Public universities actually serve a really good purpose, I think.

And then I want to take that education and then apply that and my capital to whatever I'm going to do next. So let's say like you are, you're a business owner right now. Probably a lot of people listening might be independent contractors. They might have like a job that they own as a business. Grow through acquisition. I acquihired a video production company inside of one of my companies, which just means like I needed talent in my company instead of going and hiring them individually.

I worked with a vendor. I was like, you guys are good. And I was like, hey, I think you can make more money with me than you. Why don't I acquire your company and you come on board with me? And so there's so many ways for you to not dilute yourself. It's not like you're going to go out there and buy a car wash, laundromat, and run the main business. Instead, it's like,

Hmm. How can I bring all of these businesses into my main business and continue to build an empire just in a grouping of 100 clients at a time as opposed to one? It seems like so much of this is based around just perception and mindset. I wonder how much of augmenting one's perception mindset is the aspect of.

visualization, meditation, manifestation, the secret, like sitting and rewiring your thoughts and perceptions of the world kind of alone at your house.

compared to doing research, exposure therapy, getting out there, making mistakes, meeting people, connecting. I feel like it's probably a combination of the two, but can one do much of this alone in a room without books or anything and work internally to be able to go out into the world and expand and be more open to money? What do you think of the manifestation of money?

It's interesting. I do think that if you want to attract something, it's helpful to think about it a lot and focus on a lot. A lot of these are very tactical skills and I'm a tactical person. So I think I go towards, I probably go to a mixture of the two. I go towards, it's much easier to be what you can see. So get around people that are just as human and fucked up as you are, but have the thing that you want.

I also think it's really helpful to have forward progress continuously. So, you know, each week can you get together with a group of people that are all thinking about acquisitions? And if you can do that, then you're going to just start picking up on it whether you want to or not. And your confidence level will increase because your capability increases. And I think in this vein...

There is a mindset component to it, but I think the mindset component is to pulling the trigger. It's like to actually buying the business, doing the end thing. I think your confidence level will increase materially the more that you immerse yourself because you're going to realize, oh, this rhymes. It rhymes with something else I already knew.

It rhymes with my taxes. You know, it rhymes with me looking at sales charts. You know, it rhymes with me understanding people and being able to pick really good people in other areas of my life. Huh. So I think I can I can do it. But what I found is that there's really like three things the smartest people in the world have in order to buy a business.

The first is called an investment committee. This is what private equity people do once a week. They get together, they analyze deals and they figure out they have what's called a wet blanket. So it's like, you know, it's somebody saying, Aaron, that's a terrible fucking idea. Don't buy a laundromat. Isn't that like a racial slur? Wet blanket? Oh God, I don't know. Is it? I really hope not. What am I thinking? You might be thinking, you might be thinking another one that you're not going to trick me into saying on the internet. No one should listen to me. Okay.

But they tell us in the comments. So you need to get around people that say that's a bad deal. That's a good deal. And you watch them do it live. Then you need a deal team. Your deal team is like an attorney, an accountant and a subject matter expert.

So, this would probably be like a nutritionist, you know, somebody to help you work out with. And then maybe if you have like pain, that's a specialist like you. It's like, let me work on your body and your joints and your breath. Same thing. And then finally, you typically want to have what's called a buy-side advisor. That's typically somebody who's helping you source deals. And so, that would be like a real estate agent. They're like, look at this house. Look at this house. What are the comps between the two?

Those things don't exist in the world today for normal people. They exist in Wall Street and in private equity. So I was like, fuck that. We're recreating it. So in our academy, those are the three components. You have a weekly investment committee. You have a deal team that gets together and talks to you and a vendor list that you can use. And then you have a buy side advisory where we get together and we look at finding deals together. Because I think in the future,

buying a business. Like think about this right now. Like, I don't know, maybe your audience can tell us, but like how many people go, it's impossible for me to buy a house. There's no way. People don't buy houses. I could never own my own house. We've kind of like,

Moved past that in American society. We've thought at some point if I work hard enough and I make enough money It is reasonable that I could buy a house. It's becoming more out of reach Yeah, I think I think probably like the 60s that was like much more standard I feel like there's I mean, I'm not disagreeing with you like like yes, most people eventually but

but it is, it does seem to be becoming more out of reach for young people. At least that's what I hear. No, no, no. You're right from a valuation perspective. Home home purchasing is at the highest level that it's ever been while we've had ways wage stagnation, high interest rates, all time high credit card levels. So the assets are more expensive than they've ever been. And it may seem like, gosh, I don't know if I'll ever be able to do this, but the key difference is it's not that, um,

It is abnormal or impossible to buy a home. It is like, fuck, at current level with what's happening, you guys used to be able to do this. Now I can't. I think with business ownership, it's even worse. We're like, nobody could do that. Like nobody buys businesses. That's not possible for anybody. And that I think is not real.

In fact, it's just that that's what we've been taught. So I think in like 20 or 30 years, it'll be just as normal as probably buying commercial real estate, maybe eventually as buying a home for people to buy a business, for people to trade businesses like they do assets.

I think we're just way on the cutting edge of it here. Yeah, we need to wrap up but I think that something you also reference in the book I'm pretty sure is in the book or maybe in a podcast or maybe both but was in Japan specifically how there's so many old people and not as many young people and so there's Something like hundreds of thousands of businesses from the boomers of Japan that are going under And all of that would literally be like free money on the table for people

And having this mindset shift of like what's available out there of opportunity and openness really seems like what I'm like, keep hearing you say,

say like underneath the tone of everything of it's a mindset of seeing what is possible as opposed to closing yourself down to what's possible. I think that's right. Well, I'm interested to see what happens to you now that you've read the book and that we've had this conversation. I think you're going to start seeing deals. Welcome to my podcast studio, Cody Sanchez. I'm telling you, I had, uh, Chloe, Chloe knows, but I was on a podcast with,

With a girl by the name of Nicole and it was her podcast. She was quizzing me and I told the same thing to her and she wanted to buy a nail studio. I'm like, why do you want to buy a nail studio? She's like, I love getting my nails done. I was like, okay, so it's not like some deep reason you want a nail studio. I'm like, why don't you own this podcast studio part of it instead? So I saw her like six months later and she had bought the fucking studio.

So her and a partner did it and she did it with another partner's capital. And so I think what will happen to you is you're going to turn on your reticulator activating system. You're going to start seeing this stuff all around. Yeah. And then you're going to text me and be like, what do you think about this deal or this deal?

And they're just going to open up a little bit more for you. Then devil's in the details. We'll make sure you do the deal right. But I'll be curious to see what happens to you. I love that. Yeah. I really appreciate you so much. Well, I'm here to help if I can. And if you guys buy a business online, like-

you know, truthfully, I want to know. Like, I think the point of everything that we're doing is that I hope that people take action. And I think people that take action are really rare. So I hope you guys reach out to me. I hope you tell me if you buy one or anyone you know does, because I think it's critical for our country. And I also think it shows that what we're doing is working. So please tell me. Where can...

So you have the community, you have the Main Street Millionaire book that is out. What's the date that it's out? December 3rd. December 3rd. So I'm sure this will be released around then. Where can people go from here to go deeper into all this? Because there's so much more. We're obviously only like scraped the surface. But yeah, where can people go? I'm Cody Sanchez in all the interwebs. But the book is at CodySanchez.com or MSMBook.com, like MainStreetMillionaireBook.com.

And then we're having a big event on December 12th for everybody that bought the book. So yeah, you'll be gone by then, right? I'm outie. I'll be out with the BBBLs in Miami. Maybe you'll buy a cosmetology studio there. I'm going to be. All right. Thank you so much. I appreciate you. This is a good time. It was a blast. Thanks. That is it. That's all. I'll see you next week.

Hope you guys enjoyed that conversation. I want to invite you over to the YouTube channel, Align Podcast. If you subscribe over there, you will one, get to see the video version of this as well as instructional content, as well as we pick a subscriber at the end of each month to send out some sweet prizes, including infrared panels and molecular hydrogen machines and all sorts of weird, amazing stuff. So jump over to the Align Podcast YouTube channel for a chance to win some cool stuff. And that's it.

Thanks for reviews. Thanks for doing you. Thanks for sharing it. I'll see you next week.